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By Katherine Sweeney
A typical day for Laura Frank is far from dull. Frank can be found in downtown Denver’s Buell Public Media Center, writing grants, securing health insurance for her employees, refining newsletters, or assisting media organizations that are under financial stress. In a constantly evolving news environment, Frank’s job is to determine how to develop more trust with communities and ensure improvements in the production of news in a financially sustainable way.
Frank serves as the executive director of the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab), a nonprofit organization composed of 170 news-media organizations that find collaboration to be more effective than competition.
With newspapers disappearing at unprecedented rates, and vulture hedge funds like Alden Global Capital swooping in to gut newsrooms, the world of nonprofit journalism requires inventiveness and the willingness to test new approaches.
“As an executive director, the bigger question is not only just getting the story done, but what about the distribution and the sustainability of the news organization, and, you know, the ways that we evolve storytelling and the business models of journalism?” Frank says.
News cooperatives have been around since the mid-1800s, when the Associated Press was born from a partnership between five New York papers in 1846. The AP’s not-for-profit approach has since been emulated and transformed by collaborative networks like the NPR California Collaborative and Resolve Philadelphia.
Today’s news environment necessitates a redesign for news-media organizations to keep their quality writing economically sustainable. From 2008-2019, newsroom employment declined by 23%, but the need for accountability and dependable reporting is just as essential in a pandemic-filled world.
As journalists are expected to produce informative, trustworthy news on an increasingly smaller timescale, Frank stresses the importance of finding a work-life balance within high intensity environments.
“You kind of work until what has to get done gets done,” Frank says. “No matter how hard I’m working, everybody else is working like that, too. In some ways, it’s gotten worse, because there are fewer bodies in the business.”
Frank has been passionate about journalism since her early days; she began her news journey as a reporter for her 4-H club, and later wrote for two nearby weekly papers in high school.
After getting her first post-undergraduate job as a business reporter at the Danville Commercial-News, Frank worked as a special projects reporter at the Huntington Herald-Dispatch. In the early 1990s, Frank broke a story on Fred Zain, the head of a West Virginia crime lab who had been falsifying evidence for years.
“That I know of at least six, maybe now seven people have been released from prison who would have spent the rest of their lives in prison for crimes they didn’t commit,” Frank says. “And so that’s why I became an investigative reporter, that I had some little part in that.”
After bouncing from Washington to Rochester and then to Nashville, Frank settled in Denver to work as an investigative reporter at the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. With the shuttering of the Rocky in 2009, Frank started I-News, a collaborative news network that focused on in-depth investigative pieces.
I-News was eventually absorbed by Rocky Mountain PBS, and Frank restructured the unit into a Dupont-winning investigative documentary team. Frank conceptualized the Colorado News Collaborative while working at Rocky Mountain PBS, and delved into forming the cooperative news network once the documentary team began moving in new directions.
For young journalists hoping to make their way in the news industry, Frank suggests developing the ability to think critically, communicate clearly, listen, and make good decisions. Learning how to edit video, analyze data, and even how to run a business can come in handy when least expected.
“Getting skills that will help you do things that others can’t do will kind of bulletproof your place in the industry,” Frank says.
Jobs in journalism are expected to grow by 6 percent by 2030, but this number is highly influenced by the recovery from the job losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are large discrepancies in the salary range for journalists, but the median annual pay averages out around $48,370.
An executive director of a nonprofit news collaborative needs a background in journalism, and some business savvy is also instrumental. Nonprofit executive directors make an average of $85,226 in Denver but this number is likely skewed, as it also includes the high salaries of executive directors of nonprofit health organizations.
A minimum of a bachelor’s degree is required for journalists, news analysts, reporters, and executive directors of news collaboratives, but the degree does not necessarily need to be in journalism or media.
“I’ve known many, many people who, you know, don’t have a journalism degree at all and are great journalists. So, it is one of those, you know, careers where you really learn on the job,” Frank says.
As COLab seeks to provide reliable, in-depth issue stories to its network of news organizations as well as support ailing news organizations, the nonprofit is attempting to expand sources of support for news.
As a combination of philanthropy, ad sales, and public media membership models is currently keeping many papers and stations afloat, Frank is seeking to redesign the economics of local journalism by examining new business model innovations.
Despite hanging up her reporting hat a few years ago, Frank’s goal is to create a sustainable news model that will allow organizations to continue to produce rigorously investigated stories without worrying about the volatility of the industry.
“What I like the most about this job is that you can actually play a role in the health of the democracy,” Frank says. “That you can have an impact that can change people’s lives for the better.”
